Author Archive | Jarrett

darrin nordahl’s new book

Posted on April 16, 2012 in Books, Seattle

Darrin Nordahl has a new book out, e-book format only, called Making Transit Fun! You can download Chapter 1 here: Download PDF.

I will be appearing with Darrin Thursday Wednesday night in Seattle, to promote both of our books. Details in the far-right column under my photo.

For my review of Darrin's previous book, My Kind of Transit, see here. Note that Darrin is such a classy guy that he links to my review on his website, even though my review raised major objections to that book.

Darrin is a great writer, a keen observer, and a committed urbanist. While we have utterly different perspectives (compared by Treehugger's Lloyd Alter here and by Slate's Tom Vanderbilt here) we agree about almost everything that really matters. I look forward to reading and reviewing his new book, and meeting him again in Seattle on Wednesday.

if you invite me to speak …

Posted on April 16, 2012 in Calgary

… be assured that I don't expect this!

Still, a nice gesture from Calgary Transit. I trust it flashed only briefly, so that nobody missed crucial info about when the next train is coming.

calgary: the cbc radio interview

Posted on April 14, 2012 in Calgary, Journalism

Note to the broadcast media: I'm much more coherent when you book me after 8:00 AM.

Here's CBC-Calgary's interview with me on an evening drive show yesterday, in which I sound pretty coherent. I'm not sure I want to share a TV interview the previous day which began at 6:50 am, only 23 minutes after I woke up.

walking in america

Posted on April 11, 2012 in Stop Spacing

Tom Vanderbilt at Slate is doing a series this week at Slate.com on the crisis of walking in America. He ties it to a range of issues in public health. It's also an essential part of providing more efficient (and therefore abundant) transit systems.

The first installment is here, the second here.

jane jacobs on transportation: my take

Posted on April 6, 2012 in General

The City Builder's Book Club is in the process of reading Jane Jacobs's seminal 1961 book, the Death and Life of Great American Cities. For Chapter 18, which deals with transportation, I did a guest post for them designed to kick off their discussion. It's there, but also here:

Chapter 18: "Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?"

The frame of the question is striking: “Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?” Both key terms, erosion and attrition, warn us of a gradual process, a process we might not notice as we focus on the shiny revolution of the moment.

They warn us too, that the causes will be multiple and probably untraceable. Jacobs is adamant that the automobile itself didn’t cause sprawl, just as it didn’t cause traffic congestion; the horse-and-buggy era already offered the possibility of both. So, the attrition of automobiles, as it’s achieved, will have many causes and effects. Each needed but compromised revolution – market-based parking, congestion pricing, major transit, complete streets, road diets – will take due credit for this attrition, but it will really happen through individual choices, and of course the liberation from habit that comes only from the turning of generations.

Early on Jacobs attacks Corbusier for failing to run the numbers on the freeways that were supposed to serve the massed apartment towers of his Radiant City (left). The free flowing traffic in his drawings would have been gridlock, and “his vision of skyscrapers in the park degenerates … into skyscrapers in parking lots.” Corbusier’s freeways are “embroidery,” – surely an insult to that delicate craft – adding a mood or symbol of transportation rather than providing actual mobility. Many urban “visionaries” still do that, of course, implying that a new transportation tool will be so cool to ride or drive that nobody will care if it provides the volume and efficiency required, or fits into a network that will get everyone where they need to go.

Like many urbanists, Jacobs is not very interested in how public transit works, even though it is clearly the mode that must grow as the role of cars gradually shrinks. To anyone who values pedestrians, the mode that delivers as pedestrians beyond their walking range surely deserves more thought. But what she does observe is astute.

For example, she notes that forcing surface transit to use one-way couplets is a way of sacrificing transit’s needs to those of cars, and causes a gradual loss in transit’s effectiveness. (You need transit in both directions for it to be useful in either, and moving the two directions of service apart reduces the area that can walk easily to both of them.) One way couplets aren’t universally evil. They are an essential feature of downtown Portland, for example, and work well with its 200 ft blocks. But one-way couplets that are further apart are another story, sometimes serving completely different neighborhoods with their two directions.

Still, Jacobs knew, from watching New York streets, something that transportation planners needed several more decades to establish: in a dense and active city that is rich with mobility options, there will be as much car traffic as the city chooses to make room for. Her story about the closure of the roadway through Washington Square Park – which resulted in traffic simply disappearing – is the story of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway 30 years later, and of other road capacity removals from the expressways of Seoul to the boulevards of Paris. The traffic that used the formerly busy road disappears, through countless private readjustments, so long as there is an abundant grid of alternate paths into which traffic can disperse, and other modes, such as public transit, to which it can convert, and other times of day to which it can shift its travel. (Anthony Downs later coined the term “triple divergence” to describe these three universally available paths of dissipation.)

This is how attrition of automobiles works. And apart from grand gestures like a freeway removal, it is mostly the work of small, steady work: little increases in friction to cars that subtly shift a balance. Jacobs coins the beautiful term attrition tactician – which conjures balding men in dark rooms under bright lamps, engineering the moving of curbs by a few inches each year. Only today are we seeing the emergence of the attrition strategist or even attrition visionary – charismatic figures like New York’s Jeanette Sadik-Khan or Sydney’s Mayor Clover Moore who wage the battle on some scale and do not apologize for their feared traffic impacts, nor the imagined devastation to businesses that will result if some people shift to public transit or bicycles.

The charismatic figures have their place, but most achievement is gradual. The doctrine of gradualness that pervades this chapter – and indeed all of Death and Life — is a splendid antidote to all silver-bullet theories of urban transformation, from streetcars to convention centers. Real transformation happens in people’s choices, behaviors and habits. It happens at its own unpredictable pace. We will see it only in silhouette – murky and confused – by looking at transport outcomes, but we will see it directly in the life of the city.

on “pilot” or experimental services

Posted on April 5, 2012 in General

An amazing story from Norfolk, Virginia:

NORFOLK, Va. — Hampton Roads Transit is dropping a trial bus service to the Norfolk International Airport due to low ridership.
The agency said Thursday that the pilot program will make its last runs on April 14. The last bus will leave the airport at 11 p.m.
The hourly service began Feb. 5 and originally was to run for a month. The agency says it extended the service a month but ridership remained weak.
Hampton Roads Transit president and CEO William Harrell says the airport service was a good idea but it needs some work.

I have no basis for an informed opinion about the Norfolk airport service, but I would never recommend trying any transit service for a month, or even two. Any transit service needs time to find its market. My usual advice is that you shouldn't try an experimental service unless you're prepared to run it for a year, not only so that it can build ridership but also so that you can see how its performance varies with the seasons.

When it comes to larger network redesigns, in which many route changes occur at once, the message for elected officials is even more challenging. Redesigns are simply not reversible. They have to run a full year before you can really assess them fairly, and by then, so many people are used to the new patterns of service that reverting to the old ones would be as disruptive as the intial restructuring was. If an elected official needs to believe that a restructuring can be done "experimentally," I advise them to vote against it. Obviously, a year after a restructuring, you'll tinker with things based on the ridership, and even sooner you may have to do small adjustments to handle running time or overloading problems. You'll make larger improvements after you've run the redesign for a year. But there's no going back to where you were, and in a good redesign, after a year, few people want to.

some questions on frequent network mapping

Posted on April 4, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Portland

@CityBeautiful21 tweets this question about Frequent Network mapping (explained here, examples here and here):

@humantransit In a place that is improving its transit but cannot yet draw a [Frequent Service] map by your ["every 15 minutes all day, seven days a week" requirements], how would you draw the map?

When a transit agency first sits down to do frequent network mapping, this always comes up. Not all services are frequent over the same exact span. Many are frequent all day but not evening or weekend. This the the normal outcome of a history of route-by-route and hour-by-hour service analysis.

[A Frequent Network policy will gradually enhance those analysis methods by bringing your focus to (a) the entire independent network instead of each route individually and (b) the entirety of the day rather than each hour individually. Hour-by-hour analysis of routes is especially misleading because ridership at each time of day depends on service availability another time of day; you won't use transit in either direction unless it's available in both directions at times you expect to travel, and if you're not sure when you come back, you care about the abundance and extent of the whole evening service pattern. This is why cutting evening service — which may have low ridership when analyzed trip by trip — can damage a route's usefulness throughout the service day.]

Meanwhile, how to draw the map?

1. Start where you are. If your current frequent service offering is only weekdays all day, then say that. The map will still be useful. If you can come up with some kind of minimum evening/weekend service commitment for those route segments (every 30?) then say that as part of the definition of the frequent product. Meanwhile, you can use your long range planning process to articulate the need for a more robust service span on the Frequent Network, over time.

2. Consider the larger principle, which is this: Service that is more likely to be useful to lots of people for lots of purposes, and that are designed to work together as a network, should be more visually prominent. Service that is highly specialized to a limited market should be less visually prominent, including peak-only services and any service that runs less than once an hour (or even every 30). It's these occasional service patterns that make transit maps unbearably complicated — a problem easily fixed by ensuring that your map shows those ephemeral route segments but that they recede visually so that the more frequent network stands out.

It never makes sense to draw a route that runs three times a day in the same line that you'd use for service every 30 minutes all day. The problem of such maps is the same: you weaken the meaning of a line on the map by using that line to refer to something so ephemeral and specialized, thereby implying that any line on the map may be equally ephemeral and specialized. So use a different, weaker line for those services.

For some good examples of maps showing all routes in a network, but using this principle that more frequent routes should stand out and less frequent routes should recede, see the full network maps for Portland and Spokane, discussed further in this post. Here's a slice of Spokane's, where the red lines are frequent and the fainter pink lines are peak-only:

… and of Portland's, where a wider line is Frequent and peak-only lines are dashed with a white number bullet:

Full maps here: Spokane. Portland.

In both examples, more broadly useful services are more visually prominent. Peak-only services recede (a thin pink line vs a wide red one in Spokane, a dashed line in Portland) so that you can see them but won't be distracted by them when you want to see the all-day network. Both maps also highlight the Frequent Network in different ways. Overall, I prefer the clarity of the Spokane map, because Portland introduces much complexity by trying to differentiate every route by color. But both are good design responses to the basic problem, which is: Show me the services that are most likely to be useful!

san francisco: winning speed and reliability battles

Posted on April 3, 2012 in Branding, Frequent Networks, On-Time Performance, Rail Transit, San Francisco, Seattle, Stop Spacing, Streetcars (Trams)

Major San Francisco transit lines take longer than they did a century ago, as they have been obstructed by traffic and slowed by heavy passenger loads using (until recently) inefficient pay-as-you-board methods. A New York Times piece by Zusha Elinson lays out the statistics.

(It's important to clarify, right away, that this has nothing to do with streetcars as a technology. You could easily be misled by this subtle bit of anti-bus bias:

In 1920, the F-Stockton streetcar carried passengers from the Financial District at Market and Stockton Streets all the way to the Marina at Chestnut and Scott Streets in a zippy 17 minutes. Today a very similar trip on the 30-Stockton, the successor to the F-Stockton, takes a half-hour if the stars are properly aligned.

In general, streetcars replaced by buses have slowed down more, over the last century, than those that remained streetcars, but that's an expression of how much more was invested in streetcars than in buses. The main lines that use the Market Street Subway — J through N — have picked up or shed just a couple of minutes from their 1920 times, even though back then they ran on the surface along Market St (about 3 miles) while now they're in a subway, effectively functioning as rapid transit. No such improvements were made for streetcars that became bus lines, so of course their performance deteriorated more. In fact, the 30-Stockton relies heavily on maneuverability in unpredictable Chinatown traffic; a streetcar in exactly the same traffic, unable to move around obstacles, would be even slower and less reliable.)

The real message of this story, though, is the need to have a conscious intention about the speed and reliability of transit. Highway planners ruled the late 20th century with their clearly defined notion of "Level of Service" or cars, which mowed down opposition through its simplistic A-F letter-grades. Just after 2000, the Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual sought, at first, to claim this same authority-through-simplification for transit. But while the TCQOS is a spectacular reference guide, few in the business believe that a single A-F score can capture the many important ways that transit succeeds and fails.

My own work in this area has always advocated a stronger, more transit-specific approach that begins not with the single delayed line, but rather with the functioning of an entire network. Don't just ask "how fast should this line be?" which tends to degenerate into "What can we do to make those forlorn buses move a little faster without upsetting anyone?" Instead, ask "What travel time outcomes do we need across this network?" Or turn it around: How much of the city needs to be within 30 minutes of most people? – a question that leads to those compelling Walkscore travel time maps, which are literally maps of individual freedom.

A network speed standard would identify necessary speed standards for each service type, but especially for the Frequent Network, because high frequency means greater impact of delay — both on passenger freedom and the agency's bottom line. We* used this approach in a Seattle Transit Plan study about 7 years ago:

1. Define the Frequent Network (every 15 min or better, all day, every day), including any segments that are "Rapid" (faster with fewer stops)
2. Define the policy operating speed standard for each product (frequent local vs rapid)
3. Map the existing scheduled speeds on each segment against this standard, creating a map with screaming red segments meaning "deficient."
4. Prioritize interventions to improve transit speed based on those deficiencies.

This is quite different from a classic cost-benefit approach in which we count the riders currently on a segment and assign value based on their total travel time saved, because it acknowledges that (a) a dysfunctional segment is probably driving away customers regardless of how many are on it now and (b) the outcome is the network, not just a single line.

We had a lot of success with this in Seattle at the time. Once the deficiency map was drawn, engineers noticed segments that they hadn't identified as problems before, and went to work on fixing them. Note too that the method cleanly separates problem from solution. Don't start with what you think is possible. Start with what you need. Define the absence of what you need as a citywide problem that affects the whole network. Then fix those deficiencies. If you're going to go to war with three businesses over "their" strip of on-street parking, you're more likely to break through the "big agency attacks struggling small business" frame if you're defending the entire city's transit system.

Remember: a line is only as reliable as its least reliable point, and a journey through a network is only as reliable as the least reliable of its lines involved. So one localized problem affecting speed and reliability (such as stops too close together) actually affects a vast area, and drags down public expectations for an entire network product. If it costs the agency money (as slower service always does) then it's also a direct detriment to the overall abundance of transit service. That's the frame in which you win battles over three on-street parking spaces, a signal phase, or even an entire tranist lane.

San Francisco's Transit Effectiveness Project is, to a great extent, the culimination of exactly this thought process. I remember in the 1980s or early 90s a time when Muni proposed to eliminate just one consequential bus stop; 17th & Mission. The story became: "Big, bad transit agency launches personal attack on the people and businesses at 17th & Mission." The TEP has worked to change that conversation, emphasizing that on high-frequency services, the speed of every segment is part of the whole city's transit outcomes. The same process has made it easier to do a range of other locally-hated citywide goods such as removing parallel routes that were too close together.

Does your city's transit system have a similar project underway, one that moves beyond route-by-route analysis and looks at how every speed/reliabilit deficiency harms the whole city's transit system?

*I was with Nelson\Nygaard at the time. The project was the City of Seattle "Urban Village Transit Network" study of 2004, which became a foundation of the Seattle Transit Plan.

vancouver: the frequent network revealed

Posted on April 2, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Vancouver

One of North America's most advanced transit agencies, TransLink in Vancouver, has finally published a Frequent Network Map as well as a page explaining why that map is important:

This 15 minute or better service runs until 9 p.m. every day, and starts at 6 a.m. on weekdays, 7 a.m. on Saturdays and 8 a.m. on Sundays. This level of service might be provided by one or more types of transit, such as buses or SkyTrain.
People traveling along FTN corridors can expect convenient, reliable, easy-to-use services that are frequent enough that they do not need to refer to a schedule. For municipalities and the development community, the FTN provides a strong organizing framework around which to focus growth and development.

As longtime readers know, I've long advised that high frequency services must stand out from the complexity of a transit map, and be promoted separately, so that people can see the network that's available to people whose time is highly valuable. Many individuals, and a few agencies, have drawn Frequent Network maps as a result. For more, see the Frequent Network category.

Meanwhile, this is a hugely important moment for Vancouver, especially because of the way the Frequent Network can organise future land use, and help everyone make better decisions about location. This map should immediately go up on the wall in every city planner's office, and in the office of every realtor or agent who deals in apartments. It's far more useful than, say, WalkScore's Transit Score in showing you the actual mobility that will arise from your choice of location, in the terms that matter to you.

toronto and sydney: triumphs for network planning, not just light rail

Posted on March 23, 2012 in Light Rail, Monorail, Rail Transit, Sydney, Symbolic Transit, Technophilia, Toronto

Breakthrough news on rail battles in both Toronto and Sydney, both of which I posted on recently (Toronto, Sydney).

Sydney's state government has made it official. The one-way loop of the Sydney Monorail, designed to decorate the tourism-convention playground of Darling Harbour without being very useful to anyone, is to be torn down. While the decision is being described as a move toward light rail — plans for which are definitely moving forward — it's really just a decision to invest in transit lines that do useful things — such as running in both directions, running efficiently enough to justify reasonable fares, and connecting with many other services so that people can go where they want to go, not just where you want to take them.
Toronto City Council has definitely scrapped Mayor Rob Ford's plans to spend all of the city's transit resources on a few expensive outer-suburban subway segments designed to serve small parts of the region. The move opens the way to move forward on more cost-effective light rail projects that will enrich mobility across the entire city.

Toronto transit commentator Steve Munro makes an important point, which could also be said of Sydney:

This is an important day for Toronto. We are on track for a [light rail]-based plan and for a more detailed evaluation of our transit future than we have seen for decades. Talking about one line at once, about fundraising for one project at once, is no longer an accepted way of building the city.

That's the key. The Sydney Monorail failed because it was "one line at once" — a project conceived in isolation with no interest in being part of a complete network. And in Toronto, a city with numerous desperate rapid-transit needs, planning will no longer pit neighborhoods against each other to the degree that Mayor Ford wanted to do. Instead, Toronto can move forward on projects that fit together into a more complete rapid-transit grid — serving "anywhere to anywhere" trips.

Finally, a warning to technophiles!! Technophile commenters will doubtless chalk this up the Sydney decision as a defeat for monorails in general. I disagree. It's a defeat for one-way loops, poor connectivity, and symbolic as opposed to actual mobility. The monorail didn't fail just because it was a monorail, but because it was a poorly designed line. Likewise, the Toronto outcome isn't a victory for light rail or a defeat for subways, but merely a commitment to better network design.

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